Well, if you look at the post I made in this thread, you should be fine. Just download all the codecs there and it should look good. For the contrast of the video, it could be your computers contrast, or it could be the player itself. There should be some kind of setting on your player to change the contrast. I know in Divx player if you go to "prefrences" and then to "video," there should be a way to change the contrast. Hope I could help.